3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long-term evolution (LTE) is a technology for enabling high-speed packet communications. Many schemes have been proposed for the LTE objective including those that aim to reduce user and provider costs, improve service quality, and expand and improve coverage and system capacity. The 3GPP LTE requires reduced cost per bit, increased service availability, flexible use of a frequency band, a simple structure, an open interface, and adequate power consumption of a terminal as an upper-level requirement.
The 3GPP LTE may configure carrier aggregation (CA). In CA, two or more component carriers (CCs) are aggregated in order to support wider transmission bandwidths up to 100 MHz. A user equipment (UE) may simultaneously receive or transmit on one or multiple CCs depending on its capabilities. In CA, one primary cell (PCell) and at least one secondary cell (SCell) may be configured.
Small cells using low power nodes are considered promising to cope with mobile traffic explosion, especially for hotspot deployments in indoor and outdoor scenarios. A low-power node generally means a node whose transmission power is lower than macro node and base station (BS) classes, for example pico and femto evolved NodeB (eNB) are both applicable. Small cell enhancements for evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access (E-UTRA) and evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) will focus on additional functionalities for enhanced performance in hotspot areas for indoor and outdoor using low power nodes.
As the demands on data rate keeps increasing, the utilization/exploration on new spectrum and/or higher data rate is essential. As one of a promising candidate, utilizing unlicensed spectrum, such as 5 GHz unlicensed national information infrastructure (U-NII) radio band, is being considered. A method for operating in unlicensed spectrum efficiently may be required.